In-Reply-To: <l03110701b03cbfe1fc5e@[192.168.1.117]>
From: mwm@contessa.phone.net (Mike Meyer)
To: www-html@w3.org
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 17:56:18 PST
Message-ID: <19970911.78268A8.10000@contessa.phone.net>
Subject: Re: HTML4.0 draft: comments re: inclusion of frames (fwd)
> From: Jordan Reiter <jreiter@mail.slc.edu>
> At 1:24 PM -0500 1997-10-09, Mike Meyer wrote:
> >Sorry to hear that. I was under the impression that the manure
> >enshrined in 3.2 and 4.0 was mostly W3C's recognition that 99.9% of
> I am sick, sick, *sick* of this holier-than-thou attitude that seems to say
> that anyone who every made a page that *looked* like something is a peice
> of crap and is responsible for turning the web into a peice of bloated
> waste.
I can understand that. I'm sick, sick, *sick* of having design school
dropouts tell me to reconfigure my browser, or upgrade my browser, or
change browsers, or even to buy a new computer. Sufficiently so that
I've mostly given up pointing out where minor changes in the HTML will
not change the appearnce in their browser, but make the site much more
usefull in mine.
> But if I design a site with a certain aesthetic in mind, while at the same
> time preserving its visibility in all platforms, whether or not the
> experience is the same, isn't that okay, too?
That's fine. That puts you in the .1% in this sentence:
> >This would allow the .1%
> >of the HTML authors who have information more valuable than it's
> >presentation to use those features.
> Isn't that part of what
> platform independence and media indpendence is all about?
Yup. Trouble is, the 99.9% of HTML authors who don't agree with us
think that the first W in WWW stands for "Whatever browser is popular
at the moment".
> I personally think that regardless of your attitude towards inclusions of
> certain elements (FRAME, whatever), I think W3C should be applauded for the
> way they explain these elements, especially within the framework of older
> or non-compliant browsers.
I agree - they've done an excellent job of cleaning up after the
elephants. But no matter how neat and tidy the piles are, the piles
are still have lots of shit in them.
The W3C should also be congratulated on managing to mix in things that
make writing HTML that works on platforms that aren't the latest most
popular platform easy, as opposed to the manure they are sweeping up,
which makes doing that somewhere between difficult and impossible.
If the browser vendors had paid attention to proposed standards and
existing implementations, instead of shipping whatever met their
marketing goals fastest; or even given a little thought to what they
were doing, we wouldn't be longing after features that browser vendors
who DID those things picked up from HTML 3.0.
> The web has become a visual medium. It has. It's too late for the purists
> to do much about it except close off into their own pretty little shell and
> create their own perfect little standards. But if they do this, and
> organizations like W3C don't keep some kind of determination over a HTML
> standard, then THERE WILL BE NO STANDARD for the 90% of sites that want to
> use the more recent elements.
For all practical purposes, there is no such standard now. As far as I
can tell, the only standard that most sites apply is "It looks OK in
my browser, on BOTH platforms: PC and Mac" (paraphrased from mail from
one site designer that got MY dollars to produce the abomination I
complained about).
<mike